52 l *' I \ (i ( L ill G [2J æ J MA ((Brlng unto us dessert Wtth topping." pJace I was aware, in Sulmona, that a]though there were lots of Fiats around, and people to fix them, and radios, and flush toilets, and machinery, I had already left a part of the present behind me. In Rome, you stand in the present and look at the past, but in the Abruzzi you are really in the past. Your frame of reference must become that of another century. If you live on the western slope of a mountain, there is no reason to know what there may be on the eastern slope. You may as- sume that there is an east slope, but not much more. '\tVe pushed on I was resolved to make Carunchio by dark, and the Abruzzi I saw in the late-afternoon sun made the endless gear shifting un- im po rtan t: great, ya wning valleys, greenIng and empty and awesome. No, there was nothing of Umbria here, and I would never feel the same again about the Marlboro hills. '\tVe climbed and descended through the rocks, and I began to wonder at my father, sit- tIng next to me, who had actually got out of these mountaIns a long time before without my help. I began to try to picture what Carunchio would be like The name has always sounded funny to me; that is, it is fun to say. It may not sound as funny as Poggi- bonsi (which is not in the Abruzzi but in Tuscany, on the road between SIena and Florence), but "Carunchio," w hen said properly, sounds like a small Fiat starting up on a cold morning . . with a half choke. "Carunchio" surely lacks the Gothic command of "Monte- falcone," just to the southeast of it; nor is it as expressive of the Abruzzi as "Pietrabbondante." '\tVhatever else the Abruzzi is, it is pietrabbondante. As far as I can tell, "Carunchio" as a word has no meaning. And so the place can- not implicitly have the drama of "Passo di Diavolo" or "Castel di Sangro," and by no means does it have the avenging imperiousness of cCL' Aquila." I am not sure about the origin of the word "Abruzzi," either. The Romans desIgnated an area of Italy as Bruttium, but that was Calabria, not us. They called the abruzze5i P rætuttii when the high mountains contained nothing more than democratic peasant tribes: the Vestini, the Marsi, the Pæligni, the Marrucini, and the Frentani. "Prætut- tii" is a tantalizing word, seemingly half Latin and half Italian. Do I trans- late it "before everyone"? Around 1 000 B.C., the Picenes lived between Ancona and the mouth of the Sangro, and south of the Sangro were the Samnites. They quarrelled with the Etruscans to the west but were allied with them, too, and at one point formed a confederacy with the Marsi called "I talia" and made its capital Corfinium, in the low Apen- nines east of Rome. They an fought the Romans, and, eventually, they all lost. Sulla had six thousand prisoners massacred on one occasion, but sug- gested it was nothing to get excited about, "because they were mostly Samnites." By 90 B.C., Rome had technically van- quished the rebellious moun- tain people, and she issued a Lex Julia, which granted citi- zenship to all Latin and Italic peoples remaining loyal to her. Rome was tired of fighting m J :: stubborn people to the All this doesn't explain why the Abruzzi is so called, and I suppose I should point out that it isn't even called that any- more; the name has in recent years been singularized to "Abruzzo." The first written reference to it that I can find came in 600 A.D., when St. G re go ry wrote a letter to Oportunus, the Bishop of Aprutio. The Latin "p" and "t" become cCb" and cC z " in I talian. It is possible that cc Abruzzi" is linked somehow to the Italian verb abbuzzire, which means "to turn cloudy." And if we remove the prepo- sition we find that "bruzzo" is suspiciously close to bruzzaglia, which means "rabble," and bruzzico, which means "dawn " It would have been convenient for the Romans to look eastward, think of dawn and rab- ble at the same time, then concoct a basic word to cover the rabble who lived in the dawn. Not far from Carunchio, when it was already quite dark and the little car was swallowed by the night, I stopped the engine and got out. The fragrance of the cool May night was overwhelming. If you stop in the Marl- boro hills, you see the lights of the towns along the Hudson, and so it really never gets totally dark. But on the east side of the Maiella the night is as dark as it can be in Europe. There were no lights save from the stars. These were stars I had always known, but never like this-so close that you could pick them as easily as you could a black fig in September. F 0005 h. Driving on, I thought about the night of another May, fifty-nine years before, when NIcola, my father's father, had died, precipitating the circum- stances that would send Maria Antonia and her youngest Son to America seven years later. My father had told me about that night. It was a Saturday, and every Saturday night Nicola would take his son Quirino into a caffè in Carunchio to meet his friends and sip a liquore fino-something to wash away the week. He came home at a proper hour, as always, but In the dark-